Nazi fugitive captured

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A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in Chile
where opponents of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship were tortured
has been arrested after more than a decade on the run.

Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schafer, an 84-year-old
German, last week on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Schafer has
been wanted in Chile in connection with child abuse charges since
1996, when he disappeared.

Last year a Chilean court convicted him in absentia of child
abuse, together with 26 other cult members.

Smiling and handcuffed, he refused to comment as police took him
to a cell in a wheelchair. Schafer, one of South America's most
enigmatic fugitives, was the leader of a notorious German cult in
southern Chile known as Colonia Dignidad.

A former corporal and medic in the German army during World War
II, he moved to Chile in the early 1960s. He established a
self-sufficient colony in the mountains near the city of Parral,
300 kilometres south of Santiago. Surrounded by barbed wire and
electric fences, and largely populated by Germans, the cult
remained cut off from the rest of Chile.

In 1996, a number of former residents testified that Schafer had
systematically abused the colony's young children, some of whom
were taken from their parents at birth. Others alleged cult members
had been mistreated and forced to stay in the colony against their
will.

Chilean officials also believe the colony was used as a centre
for torture between 1973 and 1990, during the Pinochet era, with
former Gestapo and Nazi officers giving torture lessons.

Police also want to question Schafer about the mysterious
disappearance in 1985 of Boris Weisfeiler, an American-Jewish maths
professor, who was last seen there.